With the emergence of college students striving to find their voices and build resumes, the college campus is an ideal setting to recruit students for peer advocacy and outreach. Peer education is beneficial to both the audience and the peer educators (Kim & Free, 2008). It is also a model that can be cost-effective and extremely efficient for spreading knowledge (Ergene et al., 2005; Mahat et al., 2008; Sawyer & Pinciaro, 1997; White et al., 2009; Zapka & Mazur, 1977). College students, embracing diversity and social justice, often become empowered to continue addressing reproductive and sexual health issues in the community outside of formal sessions, providing an ideal foundation for a mentorship program (Cupples et al., 2010).
The proposed model combines elements of existing evidence-based interventions, creating a model through which to implement a university-based, comprehensive sexual health education program rooted in peer education. It is a substantial unit of a first-year seminar course curriculum, giving the program greater credibility across campus and facilitating the program being taken seriously by students, peer mentors, and faculty members. Faculty teaching the first- year seminars will step aside on days when program material is discussed in class, allowing course teaching assistants (TAs) to lead peer education lectures. These TAs will also function as peer mentors to students enrolled in the course. Program staff will be able to monitor program effectiveness at different stages through built-in evaluations.
Through this program, students enrolled in the first-year seminar will have tri-weekly contact with a TA/educator trained in comprehensive sexual health education and peer mentoring. This regular contact will provide an environment for mentees to gain respect for their paired TA, which is the ideal foundation for forming a role model relationship. Once the rapport is cultivated, students will begin to see their TAs as acceptable mentors, and observational learning and behavioral modeling can commence. Additionally, because TA/educators will frame program content in a fun, socially relevant manner, participating students will be more likely to pattern individual behavior off of the presented material (Bandura, 2004). Having the TA/educators as a regular presence in the classroom will also provide the recurring positive reinforcement necessary for students to build self-efficacy around the knowledge and skills presented in class lectures. One-on-one meetings between TA/educators and enrolled students will further strengthen the rapport within the mentor-mentee pair and bolster self-efficacy.
In addition, attendance at extracurricular sexual health workshops will be required of enrolled students as part of their course grade. These workshops will be open to the entire campus community. Because of this, content discussed in class will be reinforced in a broader environment, speeding up the dissemination of program material throughout the student body by reaching a larger number of social networks.
As previously mentioned, successful peer education and mentoring programs have been implemented addressing adolescent and young-adult sexual health (Kim & Free, 2008; Mahat et al., 2008; Cupples et al., 2010). The biggest difference with the proposed model and existing evidence-based interventions is the target population. Changing the target population to matriculating college students requires a change in the pool from which peer educators are selected. Additionally, the premise behind successful interventions, including the MARS
program, is grounded in comprehensive sexual health education that is culturally relevant and age appropriate. Because of a slight shift in age of the target population for this program, a change in the way messages are delivered is necessary in addition to including any changes regarding population-specific risk information. After the first semester of implementing the program, it may be not only necessary, but also worthwhile to collect feedback from peer educators to see what about the program works and what does not. Finally, implementing this model requires that mentors come from the university student body instead of the general public. This will provide a potential benefit even greater than that seen in existing evidence-based interventions because the educators/mentors are more easily accessible to the mentees in the college setting.
This model pulls together and adapts some of the most effective characteristics of community and secondary school-based programs with existing models on college campuses addressing other health issues to create a comprehensive, university-based sexual health education program rooted in peer mentoring. The design, outlined in greater detail in a later section, is key to its sustainability. While not a true evidence-based intervention because it lacks real-world implementation and evaluation, program components have been carefully chosen so that, when implemented in a culturally relevant manner to the campus in question, it will prove successful in altering cultural norms and improving sexual health across campus. Students come to college campuses with varying levels of sexual health education because of diverse backgrounds. The proposed model has the ability to level the playing field so that not only do all matriculating students have access to the knowledge, skills, and abilities to have a safer, healthy sex life, but the campus environment is also one supportive of such change.